A Surprising Winner Arose From The Instagram-Twitter Spat

BABBAGE'S inbox was swamped one recent morning with hundreds of
e-mail notifications. Various friends and acquaintances wanted to
add him as a contact on Flickr, a photo-sharing service
which once set the world ablaze but which had been all but
extinguished for years. The reason for the sudden flurry,
Babbage soon discovered, was that Flickr had
just updated its iPhone app
to let users match their Flickr contacts against Twitter
followers, Facebook
friends, Google
pals and Yahoo!
e-mail addressbooks and share photos across the different social
networks with a single tap.

The previous version of the app was fusty at launch in 2009. It
became positively antediluvian with the advent of Instagram,
Hipstamatic
and Camera+. These made it easy to touch up or apply a false
patina of age to images taken with ever more powerful smartphone
cameras and upload them directly to Facebook and Twitter,
bypassing dedicated photo-sharing sites. Flickr's arms-length
integration—more links than direct posts—was clunky by comparison
and its app lacked any image-processing tools. As a consequence,
Facebook (which acquired Instagram earlier this year for $1
billion) now adds more than Flickr's overall tally of 6
billion images each month, for a total of more than 220 billion.

Flickr's detachment worked in social media's earlier, more
fragmented days. When it was launched in 2004 it allowed users to
post pictures, create photo pools and exchange points of view in
ways that its less image-sensitive rivals could not match. And
where earlier photo-sharing services charged fees, targeting
professional photographers, or limited the size and number of
uploads, Flickr set fewer limits and offered decent web-based
tools for free. Flickr Pro, a subscription-based premium service,
allowed even higher-resolution uploads and unlimited storage.
Some photographers with
a large following used Flickr as a springboard for a
successful career.

Subsequently, however, Flickr fell victim to its own success. By
underscoring the importance of photo-sharing it attracted
powerful rivals like Facebook. Had it been snapped up by someone
other than Yahoo!, a lumbering online giant which paid $35m for
it in 2005, Flickr might have thrived. Instead, it began to lose
its sparkle. Speculation swirled two years ago that Yahoo!
would sell it as part of an effort to revive its own flagging
fortunes by focusing on a narrower range of services. Under its
new boss, Marissa Mayer, that seems less likely. The revised
app hints that Ms Mayer will probably keep it close for now,
either to demonstrate her firm's relevance in the image-mad world
of social media, or to make it more attractive to prospective
buyers.

Now that Flickr has at last caught up with rivals in tapping
mobile social media and in image manipulation—it offers an array
of Instagram-like filters—users once fond of its other nifty
features might just flock back. For example, like SmugMug
and other sites oriented towards professionals but unlike
generalist social networks, Flickr makes it easy to manage and
exchange metadata (information about how and where a photo was
taken, among other things) and accommodates truly enormous images
(up to 50MB), which can be uploaded without loss of resolution.
This endears it to the swelling ranks of serious amateur
photographers.

Propitious timing also meant that the app appeared a day after
a spat
broke out between Instagram and Twitter. This was
followed by a firestorm over Instagram's proposed new terms of
service, which could be read as reserving the right to employ
users' images in advertising without their permission.
Instagram reverted
to its old terms on December 20th, but the kerfuffle
highlighted an important difference between Flickr, whose premium
service is a source of revenue, and many of its rivals,
which depend on increasingly intrusive online ads. All this,
it seems, has rekindled more than just a flicker of interest in
what used to be one of the hottest online properties around.